Monday, February 29, 2016

What influence can the meeting of the heads of the world's two largest Christian churches show on the world and international politics? Is it possible to save the Christians and Christianity in the Middle East? Pravda.Ru editor-in-chief Inna Novikova discussed these questions with Director of the Center for Strategic Communications, Dmitry Abzalov. ...

Abzalov: "Historically, religious and ethnic aspects have been particularly strong in the Middle East. It was even believed that one could manipulate the region because of that. It is very important that the two churches have declared their joint position from the perspective of public diplomacy in times of religious instability. In Syria, the Islamic State manipulates religion and religious postulates, although ISIL fighters have noting in common with religion." ...

"Radicalization is a threat to any religion: Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, even to atheists. Most terrible confrontations in the Middle East were the confrontations between different branches of Islam, rather than between Christians and Muslims." ...

Did the killer of Shlomit Kriegman, who lives in the Qalandiya refugee camp, need a Twitter account to know that his life was in the dumps?

Excerpt:

It is as if the pair of words “Palestinian incitement” had become another pain reliever to which Israel has become addicted. Like “the need to strengthen hasbara (public diplomacy),” Palestinian incitement has distracted our attention from the main issues. It is liable to lead us to the mistaken conclusion that a Palestinian mother who has lost a daughter is less aggrieved than a Jewish mother who has lost a daughter. It causes us to focus on Palestinian incitement rather than the conditions in the lives of the Palestinians themselves: the lack of a Palestinian state, the military occupation, the millions of refugees whose problem is our problem, the poverty, the roadblocks, the walls, the despair. What would we have done without Palestinian incitement? Who knows. Maybe we would have dared look inward.

Let’s review what happened yesterday:The polls are still putting Trump ahead in Tennessee, Georgia, and Virginia. Substantially ahead. The only Super Tuesday state in which he’s not leading is Texas — Cruz’s home state. For years I’ve had an obviously narcissistic conceit. No one appointed me, but I’ve taken it upon myself to be the American Ambassador, everywhere, mostly because I’ve always been baffled and not a little angry that our appointed ambassadors don’t see it as part of their jobs to defend Americans against calumnies in the foreign press and imagination. I don’t expect them to do that with outrage, or undiplomatically, just calmly to confront lies with facts, and point people to sources where they can learn more, if they’re so inclined. I’m not rude when people say crazy things to me about Americans; I’ve almost always judged them to be misinformed, not bad. But I’ve never absented myself from the conversation, either. I’ve seen it as my personal responsibility to give them better information.

Years of living as an expatriate has made me keenly aware that the United States is unusual — that is to say, exceptional — in many ways. But two ways, in particular, strike me as particularly unusual and are for me a source of real pride.

The first is our conception of freedom of expression. I can’t tell you how many people don’t understand it at all, or don’t believe me when I tell them, “There is literally nothing you’re forbidden to say in the United States.” In Turkey, I’d read in the press and be told, repeatedly, that “every advanced country” has laws against “hate speech,” or that “no country” would allow certain kinds of people to hold rallies.

Again and again, I’d say, “No, that isn’t true.” It does happen to be true of most developed countries. You all know why those neo-Nazis in Germany don’t brandish swastikas: They’d go to jail. Holocaust denial is illegal in France. Britain has extensive “hate speech” laws. When our campus wingnuts grow up, we may have them, too. But we don’t have them now. Our campus wingnuts remain, for now, campus wingnuts.

I like explaining this to people. I like explaining the brilliance of the phrase, “Congress shall make no law.” It’s quite different from constitutions that splendidly express a positive commitment to freedom of expression. Our constitution takes a much dimmer view of abstract promises to have Good Things. Ours denies the government the power to make any law infringing upon speech. It’s a big difference, and a consequential one.

People tend not to believe this at first, or don’t quite understand it. It’s a hard concept to understand, especially because it’s deeply unnatural, or so I’ve concluded from conversations in which I explain it. It seems, to most people, appalling and indecent to allow people who seem to mean it to march about shouting, “Heil Hitler.” In countries where ethnic tensions have in recent memory resulted in ethnic cleansing, it also seems, frankly, stupid. Do you want to see a Turkish mob screaming that they’re going to do to the Kurds what they did to the Armenians? No, neither do I. So yes, I do understand why well-meaning Turkish liberals think hate speech laws in Turkey might be an excellent idea. I disagree, because I know they’ll be used, in reality, to prosecute anyone on the wrong side of the government. But well-meaning people can disagree.

Usually I tell people about Brandenburg v. Ohio and National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie. These really were landmark cases. I think even many Americans, if not most, aren’t fully aware that our modern conception of freedom of speech dates from these verdicts almost as much as it does from the Constitution itself.

Clarence Brandenburg, as I’m sure you all know, was a Ku Klux Klan member who held a rally in Hamilton County, Ohio. “We’re not a revengent [sic] organization,” he said, “but if our President, our Congress, our Supreme Court, continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race, it’s possible that there might have to be some revengeance taken.” Others in the film footage were hooded, but they were armed, burning crosses, and muttering, “This is what we are going to do to the [racial epithet],” “Send the Jews back to Israel,” “Bury the [racial epithet],” “Freedom for the whites,” and “[racial epithet] will have to fight for every inch he gets from now.”

Brandenburg was convicted, sentenced to prison, and fined $1,000 under Ohio’s criminal syndicalism laws, which made it illegal to advocate “crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform,” or to assemble “with any society, group, or assemblage of persons formed to teach or advocate the doctrines of criminal syndicalism.” Brandenburg (or his ACLU lawyers, to be precise; he wasn’t that sharp) argued that these laws violated the First Amendment. The case went to the Supreme Court, and the Court unanimously agreed with him. They struck down Ohio’s laws.

The Court used a two-part test to evaluate speech: (1) speech can be prohibited if it is “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and (2) it is “likely to incite or produce such action.” [My italics.] That “and” is important.

I’m sure I’m telling you nothing you don’t know, but I promise you that no one outside of the US has heard of the Brandenburg test. I don’t know why. You’d think explaining this would be part of our public diplomacy worldwide, because it’s such an important part of our history, culture, and mores, and it’s something of which we can be so justly proud.

Sometimes they think I’m just making this stuff up. So I show them this:

There you go. We Americans do not ban this kind of speech or that kind of rally.

One of the most common wacko beliefs about the US is that we literally forbid anti-Semitic speech. Yes, this is actually a conversation you can really have, in many parts of the world — you can find real people who believe there’s something hypocritical about our objections to Iran’s sponsorship of Holocaust-denial conferences, because at least they allow such things to be said, whereas we just lock up our anti-Semites and our Holocaust deniers.

Yes, many people believe this. But no, it’s not, generally, because they’re stupid. How could people know otherwise, if that’s what they’ve heard everywhere and we make no effort to explain our culture and our legal system? That’s why they need Ambassador Berlinski. Fortunately, that one’s easy to disprove. “Ah,” I’ll say, laughing. “Let’s see. Google David Duke.” They may not know his name, but they pretty much always know what the Klan is. I guess we must make a lot of movies about the Klan.

But there’s another thing of which I’m just as proud, and I’m not sure whether it makes sense to be proud of both at the same time, although I am. I’m proud that we’re the kind of country that can let Nazis and Klansmen disgrace themselves in public, because Americans are basically decent. Such views just couldnot gain wide purchase.

I’ve asked myself many times whether these court verdicts truly represented an originalist interpretation of the First Amendment. Did they reflect a principled commitment to the plain meaning of the Constitution? Or is it possible that this jurisprudence seemed a plausible interpretation only because these cases followed such a long period of peace, prosperity, and social stability? Did we come to see ourselves as too decent to be corrupted by such obviously vile ideas? So decent that the Supreme Court justices just knew, deep down, that American Nazis and the Klan weren’t ever going gain purchase in the United States of America? Yeah, we can put up with the occasional Sieg Heil and a few flaming crosses. That stuff’s never going to get anywhere with Americans these days.

That’s the other calumny I try to correct everywhere I go. The notion that Americans are deeply racist. I would have sworn, until yesterday, that people who insisted to me that this was still a significant political sentiment in American life were out of their minds. I genuinely thought this was, overwhelmingly, a left-wing fantasy.

I still believe the first part to be true.

But I believe Trump knew exactly what he was saying. There’s no such thing as an adult American who’s never heard of the Ku Klux Klan. There’s no such thing as an adult American who’s never heard of David Duke.

The United States’ history of practicing human bondage is real. It was based on views about race still espoused by David Duke. This is known to every American adult.

Image from article, with caption: Leader of the Yesh Atid political party, Yair Lapid, and leader of the Yisrael Beytenu party, Avigdor Liberman, lead a joint conference in the Knesset regarding Israel's foreign policy. February 29, 2016.

Two former ministers on Monday attacked the government’s approach to foreign policy, arguing that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also serves as foreign minister, is intentionally weakening Israel’s Foreign Ministry.

During a jointly organized Knesset conference, Yesh Atid party chairman Yair Lapid and Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman lamented plans to close Israeli embassies and consulates across the globe and called on Netanyahu to appoint a full-time foreign minister and immediately embark on diplomatic initiatives to improve the country’s international standing.

The conference marked an unlikely alliance between the centrist Lapid and the hawkish Liberman. Political differences aside, ex-TV anchor Lapid has sought to present his Yesh Atid as a clean, fresh political grouping; Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu has been engulfed in a series of corruption scandals.

“The deterioration of our foreign relations is dramatic,” declared Lapid, who served as finance minister in Netanyahu’s third government, before the prime minister fired him and called new elections. “Our international standing has never so terrible, from 1948 until today. And what makes things even worse is that the government does not realize this. They are pretending that everything is alright. Everything is not alright.”

Former ministers Liberman (left) and Lapid at a joint conference on Israel’s foreign policy in the Knesset, February 29, 2016 (courtesy)

Israel’s national security depends on the quality of its soldiers and its strategic alliances, Lapid declared. And whereas in the past, France helped build the nuclear facility in Dimona, Germany subsidized submarines and the US provided handsome military aid packages, Lapid said that “today we wouldn’t get that.”

Lapid’s comments appear to contradict current German and American policies on aid to Israel.

Addressing a packed room, the Yesh Atid leader further decried the fact that only one half of one percent of the national state budget goes to the Foreign Ministry and that its responsibilities have been delegated to various other ministries.

“Israeli hasbara [public diplomacy] is spread out over five ministries, and none knows what the others are doing. It doesn’t have to be like that,” he said. “We can win. Israel can be accepted and beloved and its version of things can be heard. But we need to work on it. It’s possible.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) with then-foreign minister Avigdor Liberman at a meeting in the Knesset, on November 25, 2013. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Liberman, who served as foreign minister in two Netanyahu governments, most recently until May 2015, launched a bitter salvo against the prime minister. “The Foreign Ministry is the personal property of nobody, including the Netanyahu family. You can’t just take it and run it into the ground,” he said.

“What is happening today is not only absurd; it’s a real attempt to take the Israeli foreign service by force and simply destroy it,” Liberman added.

The Foreign Ministry’s budget for public advocacy stands at a mere NIS 5 million ($1.28 million) per year, the former foreign minister said. “What campaign against BDS [the anti-Israel boycott, divest and sanctions movement] can we talk about?”

Liberman went on to slam the government for its recent decision to close down several representative offices, including in Minsk, Marseille and Philadelphia. “I don’t understand what the motivation is for these moves,” he said, arguing that in times of unprecedented anti-Israel agitation in France and the US, Israel should invest more and not less in diplomacy.

He charged that the government has failed to formulate a unified foreign policy, and that while one minister expresses a hope for the demise of the Palestinian Authority, another says the PA’s survival is in Israel’s interests. Netanyahu seeks a detente with Turkey, the former foreign minister said, while Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked calls for a Kurdish state.

Former finance minister Yair Lapid (left) and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when the last government was in power, in Jerusalem on July 3, 2013. (Flash90)

“Israel has no such thing as foreign policy. There is [just] utter neglect,” Liberman concluded.

Taking the podium after Lapid and Liberman concluded their introductory remarks, several speakers addressed Israel’s foreign relations, among them Israeli diplomats, current and former MKs and international public relations professionals.

MK Michael Oren (Kulanu), the only representative of the coalition present and a former Israeli ambassador to the US, stopped short of criticizing the government, but called on Israel to increase efforts to improve the country’s image on the international stage.

Toward the end of the one-hour conference, Liberman admitted that he failed to influence Netanyahu’s policies on major issues during his time as foreign minister.

“That’s why I am not in the government today,” he said.

“When it comes to foreign policy, there is no [clear] line. When there is a policy I can agree with, there would be no reason why I wouldn’t join [the coalition]. But I’ve been there, done that already. We tried to change things from inside, and that didn’t work. So now we’re trying to change things from the outside.”

The hawkish Liberman conceded that he and Lapid disagree on many issues, “but we agree that without a strong diplomatic apparatus we won’t make any progress.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Knesset on February 29, 2016. (Miriam Alster/FLASH90)

Netanyahu, speaking later at his Likud party’s weekly faction meeting, mocked the conference as a political ploy.

“So there are some who choose to talk endlessly and to deal in political conferences, and there are those who fend off the pressures on the State of Israel and strengthen our international alliances in order to safeguard our future here,” he said.

Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely also dismissed Lapid and Liberman’s effort as a cynical political exercise. “The connection between Liberman and Lapid is a cynical connection of ‘new politics’ and old politics,” she said, mocking Yesh Atid’s slogan during the 2013 elections. “Conferences attacking the Foreign Ministry will not enhance Israel’s international standing.”

When he took office in January 1981, President Ronald Reagan looked around the world and was greatly troubled by what he saw. For more than three decades, the United States and its allies had striven to contain communism through a series of diplomatic, economic, and sometimes military initiatives that had cost hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives. And yet communism still controlled the Soviet Union, Eastern and Central Europe, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea and had spread to sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua.

Whatever its early success, it was clear that the policy of containment no longer worked. The president determined that the time had come to defeat communism based on a simple premise: “We win and they lose.” In his first presidential press conference, Reagan stunned official Washington by denouncing the Soviet leadership as still dedicated to “world revolution and a one-world Socialist-Communist state.” As he wrote in his official autobiography, “I decided we had to send as powerful a message as we could to the Russians that we weren’t going to stand by anymore while they armed and financed terrorists and subverted democratic governments.”

Based on intelligence reports and his lifelong study, Reagan concluded that Soviet communism was cracking and ready to crumble. He first went public with his prognosis of the Soviets’ systemic weakness at his alma mater, Eureka College, in May 1982. He declared that the Soviet empire was “faltering because rigid centralized control has destroyed incentives for innovation, efficiency, and individual achievement.”

One month later, in a prophetic address to the British Parliament at Westminster, Reagan said that the Soviet Union was gripped by a “great revolutionary crisis” and that a “global campaign for freedom” would ultimately prevail. He boldly predicted that “the march of freedom and democracy … will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”

He directed his top national security team to develop a plan to end the Cold War by winning it. The result was a series of top-secret national security decision directives that:

–Committed the U.S. to “neutralizing” Soviet control over Eastern Europe and authorized the use of covert action and other means to support anti-Soviet groups in the region.

–Adopted a policy of attacking a “strategic triad” of critical resources—financial credits, high technology, and natural gas—essential to Soviet economic survival. The directive was tantamount, explained author-economist Roger Robinson, to “a secret declaration of economic war on the Soviet Union.”

–Determined the U.S. would no longer coexist with the Soviet system but would seek to change it fundamentally. The language, drafted by Harvard historian Richard Pipes, was unequivocal–America intended to “roll back” Soviet influence at every opportunity.

Taking its lead from these directives, the administration pursued a multifaceted foreign policy offensive that included covert support of the Solidarity movement in Poland, an increase in pro-freedom public diplomacy (through instruments like the National Endowment for Democracy), a global campaign to reduce Soviet access to Western high technology, and a drive to hurt the Soviet economy by driving down the price of oil and limiting natural gas exports to the West.

A key element of Reagan’s victory strategy was the support of anti-communist forces in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, and Cambodia. The “Reagan Doctrine” (a name coined by syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer) was the most cost-effective of all the Cold War doctrines, costing the United States less than a billion dollars a year while forcing the cash-strapped Soviets to spend some $8 billion annually to deflect its impact. It was also one of the most politically successful doctrines in Cold War history, resulting in a Soviet pullout from Afghanistan, the election of a democratic government in Nicaragua, and the removal of 40,000 Cuban troops from Angola and the holding of UN-monitored elections there.

And then there was SDI—the Strategic Defense Initiative—dismissed as “Star Wars” by U.S. skeptics but which put the Soviet military in a state of fear and shock. A decade later, a top Soviet strategist revealed what he had told the Politburo at the time: “Not only could we not defeat SDI, SDI defeated all our possible countermeasures.”

By the time Reagan left office in January 1989, the Reagan Doctrine had achieved its goal: Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet system, publicly acknowledged the failures of Marxism-Leninism and the futility of Russian imperialism. In Margaret Thatcher’s words, Ronald Reagan had ended the Cold War without firing a shot.

Lee Edwards, a distinguished fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, are co-authors of A Brief History of the Cold War.

Image from article, with caption: Bilateral meeting between the Emir of the State of Kuwait, His Highness Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg

Excerpt:

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed closer cooperation between the Alliance and Kuwait during his first official visit to Kuwait on 29 February 2016. Speaking at the site of the future NATO-Kuwait Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI) Regional Centre, Mr. Stoltenberg praised Kuwait’s commitment and vision in bringing NATO closer to the Gulf region. As the Alliance’s first presence in the Gulf, the NATO-ICI Regional Centre will be a hub for NATO’s practical cooperation with Kuwait and other ICI partners, as well as Saudi Arabia and Oman.

“Today, we are taking our partnership to the next level” said the Secretary General. The NATO-ICI Centre will foster cooperation between NATO and Gulf partners in a number of areas, including strategic analysis, civil emergency planning, military-to-military cooperation and public diplomacy. It will also serve as a link between NATO and the Gulf region, to share expertise and improve understanding. ..

USC Center on Public Diplomacy<cpd@usc.edu>

Feb 29, 2016

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About Me

A Princeton PhD, was a US diplomat for over 20 years, mostly in Eastern Europe, and was promoted to the Senior Foreign Service in 1997. For the Open World Leadership Center, he speaks with
its delegates from Europe/Eurasia on the topic, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United" (http://johnbrownnotesandessays.blogspot.com/2017/03/notes-and-references-for-discussion-e.html). Affiliated with Georgetown University (http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/jhb7/) for over ten years, he shares ideas with students about public diplomacy.
The papers of his deceased father -- poet and diplomat John L. Brown -- are stored at Georgetown University Special Collections at the Lauinger Library. They are manuscript materials valuable to scholars interested in post-WWII U.S.-European cultural relations.
This blog is dedicated to him, Dr. John L. Brown, a remarkable linguist/humanist who wrote in the Foreign Service Journal (1964) -- years before "soft power" was ever coined -- that "The CAO [Cultural Affairs Officer] soon comes to realize that his job is really a form of love-making and that making love is never really successful unless both partners are participating."